ACOUSTICS

"Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century."

-Pete Seeger

"I grew up on electrified music. My earliest desire to be a musician
came from seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show (I’d never seen
grown ups have fun before). In my mind I don’t distinguish amplified
sound from acoustic sound as such. The difference between one sound and
another is just that. At one time I made the electric/acoustic
distinction and considered it meaningful (I played saxophone then and
had been moved by Roland Kirk saying he could still make music when the
lights went out). One morning, half-asleep, I heard Concerto for Cootie
playing through a door and down the hall and for several seconds I
thought it was Jimi Hendrix. After that the dichotomy became less
meaningful to me.

My interest lies in physically generated sounds (i.e., those made by
instruments or by the human body) –amplified or not. Had I grown up on
Grandmaster Flash or My Life in the Bush of Ghosts instead of the
Beatles and Hendrix, I might be more intrested in the synthesis of
sounds than the physical generation of them. This seems more realistic
to me. But . . .

Anyway, in my little world, electricity is used to amplify natural
sound but not to create it. To myself I seem now to be distinguishing
between where a sound comes from (physical act) rather than how it
manifests. What I want from amplification is a certain amount of
transparency, passivity, whatever you want to call it. This is
arbitrary, it’s just what floats my particular boat. As I once made a
distinction between acoustic and electric, I now seem to be making a
distinction between generated and synthesized. Perhaps, having grown up
in an analog world (and having lived in Luddite circumstances for
several periods of time) I don’t feel the connection to the process of
sound making without direct physical activity. In the long run I don’t
doubt that this dichotomy is as meaningless as the prior one (at least
to listeners). Sound is sound."
-Alex Ferris

If electronic musicians sought to understand what music is instead of
trying to produce it, we would make tremendous progress toward solving
the problem which music sets the science of men.
- Claude Levi-Strauss